Bird: A Novel, by Noy Holland
Bird: A Novel, By Noy Holland. The industrialized technology, nowadays assist every little thing the human requirements. It includes the daily tasks, works, workplace, enjoyment, as well as a lot more. One of them is the excellent web connection and computer system. This problem will certainly ease you to support among your pastimes, reading behavior. So, do you have prepared to review this e-book Bird: A Novel, By Noy Holland now?
Bird: A Novel, by Noy Holland
Best Ebook PDF Online Bird: A Novel, by Noy Holland
This is a novel about the persistence of longing in which the twin lives of the title character blur and overlap. Bird puts her child on the bus for school and passes the day with her baby. Interwoven into the passage of the day are phone calls from a promiscuous, unmarried friend, and Bird’s recollection of the feral, reckless love she knew as a young woman. It’s a day infused with fear and longing, an exploration of the ways the past shapes and dislodges the present.In the present moment, Bird dutifully cares for her husband, infant, older child. But at the same time Bird inhabits this rehabilitated domestic life, she re-lives an unshakeable passion: Mickey, the lover she returns to with what feels like a migratory impulse, Mickey, whose movements and current lovers she still tracks. With Mickey, she slummed and wandered—part-time junkie, tourist of the low-life—a life of tantalizing peril. This can’t last, Bird thought, and it was true.Noy Holland’s writing is lyrical, fired by a heightened eroticism in which every sight and auditory sensation is charged with arousal. The writing in this book – Noy Holland’s first novel -- is fearless in its depiction of sexual appetite and obsessive love. It sheds light on the terror of abandonment and the terrible knowledge that we are helpless to protect not only ourselves but the people we most love.
Bird: A Novel, by Noy Holland- Amazon Sales Rank: #334865 in Books
- Published on: 2015-11-10
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.30" h x .90" w x 5.60" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 176 pages
Review Praise for Bird:"the language used to tell this story create a certain beauty a rhythm."—Elle Magazine"Bird, a short, poetic book, treats memory as if it were more real, more solid than the present... But the Bird of her memories is frenetically mobile, recalling not only passion but a road trip worthy of Denis Johnson, full of Faulknerian characters and equally disturbing personal revelations... A short, bittersweet tale about how the longing for passion lives on, unsustainable in all but the persistence of memory."—Boston Globe"a potent account . . . [Bird] is remarkably innovative and astonishingly original, defying easy categorization as it daringly pushes boundaries with language and story structure. . . . Holland’s clever depiction of the blurry lines between love and hate, devotion and abandonment, and detachment and obsession will give fascinated readers a lot to ponder."—Booklist"powerful debut novel...ultimately transforms itself into a densely layered tale of lust and ache, filled with touches of the bizarre. A fascinating novel."—Publishers Weekly Starred Review"[Holland] gives Bird's past with Mickey a visceral immediacy...An admirable tour de force of imagery and linguistic pyrotechnics."—Kirkus"A wonderfully mysterious and inventive novel about the search for the sublime at home and in the wider world." —Jenny Offill, author of Last Things and Department of Speculation"This is Noy Holland at her dazzling and disturbing best. She animates what we struggle to keep unknown, the suppressed, the barely to be borne, in a prismatic, restless language that illuminates a heaven and hell of visions and want."—Joy Williams, author of State of Grace and The Visiting Privilege"Headstrong and heartsick; a nerve scraped raw on every page. This is the kind of brilliant work that can be devoured in a day but should be savored far longer."—Amelia Gray, author of Gutshot"The present is mercilessly upended and contaminated in this ardent and harrowing telling of Bird's erotically charged, drug- addled fascination with something jungly -- the Abyss in the shape of Mickey, a youth galvanized by his own implosion. Noy Holland writes with an incandescent ink." —Rikki Ducornet"Every sentence in Noy Holland’s Bird is, as always, an amazement, a complete drama about rhythm and texture and rendition that’s in reality a complete drama about the brutal perplexities called our rented world.” —Lance Olsen, author of Theories of ForgettingPraise for The Spectacle of the Body:“Ms. Holland habitually challenges the usual limits of language, but the effects of her exuberance are never precious and often turn suddenly into beauty; her characters portray themselves in a discourse that is startling but genuine, the secret syntax of real lives.” –William Ferguson, New York Times Book Review“If you could breed a writer out of Faulkner by John Hawkes, and put it in a female frame, you might have Noy Holland.” –Padgett Powell“Holland writes with masterful clarity and startling power about people who stay in our lives. Her fiction is profound, moving, and important.” –Frederick BuschPraise for What Begins with Bird:“A ravishing associative logic of recurrent objects and sounds distinguishes Noy Holland’s original stories. Old wisdom newly and grandly delivered.”–Christine Schutt, author of Florida“In wonderfully cadenced and concise prose, Swim for the Little One First cracks the chests of struggling lives to show the hearts beating within. These stories of difficulty are not sentimental, nor are they artificially cold: they are wonderfully, nakedly human.”–Brian Evenson, author of The Wavering Knife“The syncopated rhythms of Noy Holland’s rapturous prose jolt the heart and spark the senses. If you can bear to explore the limits of your own compassion, open this book to ‘Blood Country’ or ‘Milk River.’ You cannot prepare yourself: you can only surrender.”–Melanie Rae Thon, author of The Voice of the River and In This Light“Holland’s scrupulousness and respect for the language keep this text alive and kicking. What Begins with Bird is a book to be read slowly and thoughtfully, shared, passed along.” –John Edgar Wideman“From broken phrase to sentence, from sentence to paragraph, from paragraph to scene and scene to story, Noy Holland’s aims are ambitious, her tone right, her diction masterful, and she spells her stories out in bites of beautifully lyrical but bitter prose and with an ardent grimness of eye that is both unsettling and intensely satisfying. What Begins with Bird is a remarkable achievement.” –William Gass
About the Author Noy Holland is the author of three story collections, Swim for the Little One First, What Begins with Bird, and The Spectacle of the Body. Recipient of fellowships from the NEA, the MacDowell Colony and the Massachusetts Cultural Council, she teaches writing in the graduate program at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. He crossed her wrists behind her, walked her into the room. She was gowned in a towel from the tub, damp still, the day passing – cold, the green fust blown. The city was flattened, looked to be; it was a poster of itself, grainy, famous in any light. He walked her where she could see it, where she could see the breidge, the man on a thread descending, his tiny pointed flame. She saws the hot blue branmble of wleder’s sparks fizzing out over the river. Across the river: the fabulous city. He had set screw eyes in the floor. The floor was grooved, adrift with hair, the deep tarry blue of the ocean. He trained the heater on a patch of floor to warm the boards she would lie on. He pulled the towel off, helped her down in stages, onto her knees, her back. The boards were gummy; they smelled of paint. They smelled of his dog who leked in her sleep. She let him tie her—wrist and wrist and ankles. As he wished. He arranged her as he wished. He spread out her hair like a headdress, tall, like grass the wind has knocked down. He turned her toes out. he turned her wrists up when he tied her. Something small—a bird—several—wobbled, blown behind her, the flock a scattering of ash in the wind in the cold above the river, the barges moored. The garbage scow. He lifted her head, knotted the scarf at the back of her head, the scarf snug across her eyes, her motehr’s scarf, across her mouth and nose. The scarf smelled of her mother. He trained the heater on her, and the cooling fan, oscillating, faint. He lit a candle, tipped it into the wind the fan made, and the wax blew hot, dispersing—sparkler, pod, nematocyste, a burn that lights and shrinks. He let the wax ound on the skin of her wrists—to merk the place, or seal it: here was the first place he touched her. Here was the mineral seep, the drip in the cave, the years passing. Here a notch—where the tendons o fher neck knit into her chest and the wax would catch and pool. He said nothing. He scarcely touched her. Thrust into her once and walked out. She heard him go. Two doors, the last stairs, hello on the the stoop, he was gone.
Where to Download Bird: A Novel, by Noy Holland
Most helpful customer reviews
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful. Exquisitely Written By David McMurray Noy Holland’s first novel, Bird, follows the eponymous character through a labyrinth of haunted memories and conflicting desires as she navigates a single day in a now quasi-claustrophobic domesticity that revolves around a husband, a school-age boy, an infant daughter, and the family dog. Much of that day is spent—even as she multi-tasks—vacillating between thoughts of Mickey, a man she once loved (and can’t quite let go of, more than a decade after the fact), and the immediacy of the moment in all of its corporeal obtrusiveness (her restless boy—who pees in his sleep and needs to be fed and readied for school; her daughter, whose first tooth—newly arrived—digs into the woman’s nipple as the infant breastfeeds in a bloated diaper; Bird’s husband, who conveniently sleeps through the mess of her morning ritual until it’s time for his pre-work routine to take center stage; a long time friend—the embodiment of all that Bird once was and can no longer be, for better and worse, envied and pitied, both—who phones repeatedly).The past and present mingle together like guests at a cocktail party as she moves seamlessly between the two, although on this particular day, her history with Mickey, recounted in fits and starts, is the more assertive presence. But it isn’t nostalgia as a refuge against the shell of what she imagined her life would be. It’s far more complicated than that, and the existential tension of this tangle of competing impulses is what drives the story.There’s a real stream-of-consciousness feel to the narrative (sans the literary affectations of a historically circumscribed Stream of Consciousness style). It doesn’t follow a linear path. Its trajectory is more akin to that of a spiral—around and about and back and forth; shirking a simple ‘here, then there.’ It reflects the way people think when they’re engaged with the world in a way that is more complex and demanding than, say, what one would experience while lying in bed, late at night, waiting to fall asleep. But Holland’s verisimilitude isn’t one of mimesis. It’s an exercise in evocation; slouching toward the felt-but-not-seen texture of thought—its scent, its temperature, its cacophony—without attempting a strictly literal rendering or slavishly adhering to the kind of linear contrivance (for the sake of narrative clarity) that most readers and writers are more comfortable with. Having said that, it’s not hard to follow.Holland confines her ambition (considerable in scope) to an interior landscape, without the ubiquitous accoutrements of the extraordinary that serve as low-hanging fruit in the quest for the most facile kind of dramatic tension; no guns or assaults or wars; no pandemics or natural disasters or post-apocalyptic rubble, just a woman in her suburban home, (mostly) alone with her thoughts, over the course of an otherwise nondescript day. And she imbues it with drama, and the drama is real, and imminently recognizable. And haunting.Her prose is exquisite (an understatement) and her 'voice' is truly distinctive. She has a poet’s sense of rhythm, and a poet’s eye for the hidden potency in the most pedestrian and obtuse of things. A book full of surprises, even at the granular level—the paragraph, the sentence, the phrase, the word—like a Russian nesting doll. I keep rereading it. It doesn’t get old.And Kiki Smith on the cover to boot.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful. And the point is? By D. Burke There are stories rely too heavily on back story, and those that do no reveal nearly enough. With barely a clue about Bird's past, other than the fact that her mother had died under probably not the best of circumstance (but who knows?), I became exasperated her obsession with her ex-boyfriend, a self-destructive, unreliable, wholly unappealing train-wreck who nearly destroyed her life. Bird has somehow, at some point, escaped the situation, landed a decent husband, and is the mother of two small children, yet the bulk of the story involves Bird sliping in and out of a fugue state in which she relives her life in a broken down car, in vermin-infested apartments, squatting with a crazy couple they met on the road, with Mickey. It is intimated that Bird met him when when she was vulnerable enough to find his drug fueled, maniacal "passion" alluring enough to follow around for what seems like a few years, slumming in squalor, neglecting a supposedly beloved dog to death, getting pregnant, miscarrying (thanks God), doing drugs, fornicating on dirty mattresses, fighting. It is never clear how or in what way this man was captivating enough to have had her follow him around for so long, being abandoned over and over. and ultimately dumped for her best friend (another singularly unlikable person with no redeeming qualities). It's a total mystery why, years later, she cannot let go--she glides through her days dreaming about their time together, or taking about him to her best friend while absently feeding and clothing her children. As she relives her past, there are snippets of inner dialog she has with her dead mother, but they reveal little about who the mother is, what kind of mother she was to Bird, the circumstances that led to the mother's death, and what kind of childhood Bird had (one can assume it was not the best). The story never reveals how Bird not only to managed to extricate herself from her life with Mickey alive and intact, but also to meet and marry a decent husband (a man of pure mystery--he is totally absent from the story). In fact, the story reveals little about Bird herself. With Mickey, she is a passive foil, hopeless under his spell. In her current life, she doesn't seem to do anything but nominally care for her children and dream about Mickey. One is only eft to wonder what her husband ever saw in her. There are no epiphanies, there is no denouement; the story fades out on a note that suggests Bird will never get over Mickey. Which left me feeling more than a little peeved at myself for having continued to read the book, hoping that some insight, some aha moment, some significant turn of events might redeem it. Hmmm. Maybe I am more like Bird than I care to admit.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful. Not worth the time! By Cynthia Davis I felt that despite the good publicity,. the novel was scattered, no point of entry for the reader, confusing, and not extremely well-written. I would not recommend this to anyone.
See all 4 customer reviews... Bird: A Novel, by Noy HollandBird: A Novel, by Noy Holland PDF
Bird: A Novel, by Noy Holland iBooks
Bird: A Novel, by Noy Holland ePub
Bird: A Novel, by Noy Holland rtf
Bird: A Novel, by Noy Holland AZW
Bird: A Novel, by Noy Holland Kindle
